moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should, in co-operation with the provinces, implement clinical, multi-centre heroin prescription trials for injection to opiate users, including protocols for rigorous scientific assessment and evaluation.
Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the House today to debate my private member's Motion No. 454. I would like to spend a few minutes detailing why the issue is very important not just to my constituents but to people across Canada.
When I was first elected in the riding of Vancouver East in 1997, the first event I attended, before I actually arrived in the House of Commons, was a very tragic community gathering in Oppenheimer Park. The neighbourhood people, who were very concerned about the number of deaths from drug overdoses, had gathered to put up 1,000 crosses in the small park in the middle of this very low income community on the east side of downtown Vancouver. The 1,000 crosses were put up to represent the very tragic lives and deaths of people who had died from drug overdoses.
I have the sad duty to report that in British Columbia the leading cause of death now for men and women between the ages of 30 and 44 is actually from drug overdoses. In fact, in 1998 the number of people who died from drug overdoses was 371, which is an astounding number when one thinks about it.
I thought a lot about this issue and about what we needed to do to come to grips with a very serious health problem. Our local Vancouver-Richmond Health Board was so concerned about the issue of HIV, AIDS and hepatitis C infection among injection drug users that in October 1997 it actually declared a state of health emergency in the community on the downtown east side. This has caused me to bring the issue forward to the House of Commons.
I met with the Minister of Health on several occasions and have raised this previously in the House. I wanted to bring this motion forward to draw attention to the tragedy of what takes place in too many communities in Canada where, because we have had an emphasis on the criminalization of illicit drug use, we have seen many people become further marginalized in society.
The purpose in bringing this motion forward today is to have a debate in the House of Commons on the importance of what is called a harm reduction approach when it comes to drugs. The purpose of Motion No. 454 is to reduce the harm associated with obtaining drugs on the street. The purpose of the motion is to look at how we can protect the community, reduce crime and also save lives because too many people are dying.
In bringing forward this motion, I really wanted to make it clear that the motion simply states that a medical approach to heroin maintenance is one alternative that should be explored. The motion is clearly not about the legalization of drugs or heroin. The motion does not encourage condoning heroin use. It is aimed toward facilitating the research needed to implement an effective alternative regulated treatment option for heroin addicts.
The research I have done has led me to the conclusion that we need to have health intervention. We need to focus on harm reduction. We need to have a medicalization of addiction that allows us as a society to say that the answer is not just to throw people in jail or to criminalize them. We need to provide support, treatment, education and, in some instances, help to people who are facing a chronic addiction because treatment may have failed.
We are now learning from other models, particularly in Europe, where they have been very successful in enrolling volunteers, hard core addicts, who become part of a heroin maintenance program. It is a very well controlled, scientific program which has actually reduced the amount of criminal activity taking place. It has actually reduced the amount of activity that takes place in terms of buying drugs on the black market. It has improved peoples' health status. In some cases, it has allowed people to go back to work, find jobs, be in better housing and basically put their lives together.
This motion is about opening up a debate and saying that our approach to illicit drug laws in the past has been based on views that do not make sense today. If we are really serious about saving lives, protecting the community and reducing the crime that comes about as a result of obtaining drugs on the street, then we need this kind of medical intervention.
There is no question that there is a growing number of health care professionals, people in the justice system and recently the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, who have been calling for the decriminalization of small amounts of illicit drugs, and for better treatment, better support and better education. The list is growing of people who recognize that the approaches we have had in the past simply are not working.
I would like to detail some of the support that is out there. The most notable one is the Canadian Medical Association. At its board meeting last December 1998, it passed the following resolution:
The CMA recommends to the federal Minister of Health that the investigation of prescription of heroin for opiate-dependent individuals follow the same approval protocol in practice for the use of any therapeutic drug in Canada; and that the CMA recommend that methadone maintenance and counselling programs be more widely available across the country with appropriate education and remuneration of professional delivering such programs. This recommendation applies also to correctional institutions.
That is from the Canadian Medical Association.
The former B.C. provincial health officer, Mr. Millar, in his 1998 report “HIV, Hepatitis and Injection Drug Use in British Columbia—Pay Now or Pay Later”, also recommended that controlled legal availability of heroin, in a tightly controlled system of medical prescription, should be pilot tested as an option, as part of a comprehensive harm reduction program.
In 1997 there was a federally funded national task force on HIV, AIDS and injection drug use. It included representatives from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian AIDS Society, among others. The task force recommended a continuum of treatment options and also called on the federal government to conduct clinical trials of prescription morphine, heroin and cocaine as alternative approaches, such as is being done in other countries.
Even a high ranking Health Canada official, Mr. Rowsell of the Bureau of Drug Surveillance of Health Canada, has been reported in the media as saying:
—an initiative to gather evidence looking at the benefits and risks of heroin maintenance will be helpful.
The list goes on. We had a chief coroner's report in 1994 in B.C. that came to the same conclusion. The Canadian Psychiatric Association has encouraged Health Canada and the government to look in this direction. The Canadian Addiction Research Foundation is on the list.
Organizations around the world are beginning to recognize that this kind of approach is something that will produce an overall benefit, not just in terms of individual users who are leading very desperate lives and are very marginalized, but in terms of the benefit to the community and to society as a whole.
This is a controversial issue. I have had people come up to me and say “You are just talking about legalizing drugs”, or “This is something that we could not do”. I believe that if the federal government and the Minister of Health were committed to working with some of these organizations, like the Canadian Medical Association, then we could set up the appropriate protocols that are actually being developed by the Canadian Addiction Research Foundation in consultation with other professionals and scientists. The protocols are now being developed, but it requires leadership from the health minister and from the Canadian government in co-operation with the provinces to say that this is a pilot program.
The notion of multi-centre clinical trials for a heroin maintenance program is something which we should set up as there would be a great benefit. We can learn from other countries which have already done this. We would not be carving out new ground.
Information from the Swiss program, for example, has told us that when nationwide heroin trials were implemented in 1994 there was overwhelming support for the program. Criminal offences and the number of criminal offenders dropped 60%. The percentage of income from illegal and semi-legal activities fell from 69% to 10%. Illegal heroin and cocaine use declined dramatically. Stable employment increased from 14% to 32%. The physical health of people dramatically improved and most participants greatly reduced their contact with the drug scene.
By making contact with people who are marginalized, who are living on the edge of society because we force them to do so by our laws, we can bring them into an appropriate model of health care, into an appropriate setting for social support, for housing and for counselling. People can then begin to put together the pieces and make choices in their lives.
I have been very honoured in my riding to meet quite frequently with drug users. Perhaps not many members of parliament have been able to do that. These individuals have their own organization in the downtown east side called the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, or VANDU. These people are trying to assert their own rights. They are trying to find their own voice to tell those of us in positions of responsibility and authority that they matter. Their lives matter. Because they have such difficulty in accessing the health care system, many of them live in slum housing, inappropriate housing, and most of them do not have access to adequate and proper services.
The injection drug users are calling on us to take responsible action. They have done a huge amount of very important work in my community in bringing forward to our local health board and to other bodies the fact that they have rights and that, in many ways, the health care system has failed them.
This issue generates a lot of debate. It deals with our mindset around illicit drugs. However, my interest is to bring forward the desperation and the urgency that exists, not just in my community in the downtown east side, but in many urban centres. People are dying on the streets from drug overdoses because they cannot get the help they need, the housing they need or the medical support they need.
We have a responsibility to look at this issue seriously. I encourage members of the House to be supportive of modernizing and updating Canada's drug laws. I encourage members to promote harm reduction strategies. I encourage members to continue that work and to impress upon the Minister of Health that we will support any initiative he takes to bring this forward. The minister will have support from the medical community. He will have support from the association of Canadian police chiefs and he will have support from the coroners who see the bodies that come in as a result of drug overdoses.
There comes a time when we have to have the courage to stand and say that we have to have change, that what we have done in the past is not working, and that we need a new approach.
I ask members of the House to look at the evidence. Look at what happened in Switzerland. Look at what happened in Europe. Look at our communities and see the people who are suffering and consider this motion as a way of bringing forward a program that will save lives, protect the community and deal with this very urgent health matter.